Monthly Archives: August 2017

Well, rancherinos, it’s been another glorious week of remembering the always-there aftereffects of a couple of bouts of cancer and the attending treatment (namely, chemo and radiation) that churn up in the wake of that horrible ship that passes through your life.

This past week – technically, last weekend, I suppose – I started feeling a bit “off” and then got a horrid, watery cough, and then started coughing up some crap out of my face and we decided it was xray time. My back to school gift was apparently a raging case of pneumonia. Everybody else got pencil boxes (does anyone remember those?) and I got this. Rip off.

Still, I saw my doctor, I got an xray, and I got my antibiotics without spending a dime: thanks to February’s adventure, I blasted through my out of pocket limit before this year really got rolling, and that’s a good thing, since this is the third serious bout of pneumo, two of which involved hospital stays.

What have I been up to? Beyond hauling myself out to feed the bees and working, not much. I have definitely been doing nothing to clean up the gardens, which are desperate to be cleaned, because one, it’s way too hot here right now, two, my energy reserves just are not back to where they need to be, and three, did I mention it’s fucking hot? It is. I’ve also not been writing much even though the attitude is there to do it – fighting off things that make you cough almost uncontrollably every ten minutes, which then take you another five to recover from are not really conducive to that. It’s made worse by coughing fits that threaten to swell the throat, and with someone with an already limited opening, can cause a tinge of panic that there’s going to have to be a 911 call in there somewhere. Fortunately, I’ve been concentrating on staying calm after the fit passes and letting things get back to as normal as they can be.

On the plus side, I’ve been reading more books this year, and just finished one that made so little sense, plot-wise, and took away from a series character everything that made him what he is right up to that book, that I almost didn’t finish it. But I did because I am apparently a glutton for punishment. I’m now back to the Lucas Davenport series by John Sandford (currently reading #11), which I left off late last year because it was time for a break from that series. I’m having a hard time finding another series to have on my list that I would like to read – the ultra-jingoistic right wing nutjob novels are not my thing, and some series I found intriguing only have a couple of books in them, which I could read in a day – I read incredibly quickly, which is why libraries were always my thing when I was young and why Kindle Unlimited is fantastic for me now: I can read quite a number of books without bankrupting myself.

The downside to Kindle Unlimited is while there are tons of bad self-published books out there in general, KU is absolutely a giant mountain of them. This is not a ding against self-publishing. It’s where I’ll be starting at first because I don’t want to wait out the usual timeframe it takes to find an agent, and then for that agent to find a publisher, and then for that publisher to get the goods out the door. Do I want some traditionally-published work at some point? Sure, why not. They have budgets and editors and cover designers and PR people that I do not. But if I can show an agent/a publisher that I have a track record and a platform (I hate that fucking term, let me tell you), I think that would help in getting to the traditional route.

College football started today, in the same way restaurants have soft openings: a handful of games, spread throughout the day, not a whole lot of gotta-see games, although OR State versus CO State turned from a neck and neck game into an obliteration by COST thanks to turnovers by ORST. Later tonight: Stanford (ranked team) versus Rice, from Australia.

And lastly, the weight thing: I’ve been trying to put on some weight in order to improve my overall quality of life and increase my “reserve” (as the medical people say) and to get the feeding tube removed, and have been pounding that as much as I can. I’m now hovering around 100 pounds, something I consider not too bad, considering that I left the hospital back in February at 92 pounds.

Today? Raining, off and on, making it a lousy day to get things done outside even if I were able to do it. Nope, hanging out, doing work stuff, reading in the breaks, and right now getting a shake and coffee down the hole in my face to keep those intake calories going.

So there we have it, folks. Battles being fought between the evil forces of infection who want to kill me and the white hat of modern pharmacology. Seems to me the good guys are once again winning this round.

Checked up on the girls today. It was a (mostly) good day for them to be flying off, foraging for nectar. Usually, this time of year is a real dearth for the bees: it’s too hot, not enough rain, and nothing is blooming. This year, though, we’ve had quite a bit of rain, and it hasn’t run up to 100F+ every single day for weeks at a time as it has in the past.

They’re doing nicely, although I believe one hive may have gone queenless. I stole a frame with capped brood, larvae, and eggs, and put it in that box, and hopefully they will go about their business of making a new queen. As we head toward fall, we will have another nectar flow – one good thing about Florida that counteracts at least some of Florida Man’s escapades.

In other news, another item to restore your faith in humanity(ish). Lovebirds who have a genetic condition that causes them to lose their feathers. Not only is this video aww-worthy, you can really see the dinosaur ancestors of these little birds.

My plan, last night, was set: after a couple of pain in the ass days trying to figure out why one function in an app we use that is designed to make our lives easier just….stopped. One night it was fine, and the next not. So, tickets in to the app dev people and the organization it was supposed to connect to when it started going into the toilet (soon it will be a week of this crap). Neither has any ideas, and I made it quite clear that nothing whatsoever changed in the environment. One, after a bit of back and forth, told us to check with our “service provider” to see if anything changed. Well, dude, we ARE our “service provider” and I just freaking told you nothing changed. The other vendor level one, no idea, level two, asked us to try a couple of things that made no difference, and then, level three, to see if they had any ideas.

After yesterday, my plan today was to write in the morning, then get back to this giant problem, but instead got sucked back into Giant Problem immediately. I have been working on this literally ALL DAY, trying on my own to figure out some way around or through Giant Problem. Nothing has worked. It is supremely annoying and no one seems to have any ideas for a solution to this weirdo thing that’s happening. Grrr.

But it’s quiet right now, even though I’m also trying to figure out a few user-related headscratchers that likewise are not working when before they have been fine. This is how tech infects every minute in your life. There is a solution to that last issue: leave it, for now. Go make art for awhile. It may or may not be possible, depending on whether you can get that stuff pushed aside in your head for a bit to make room for the creative stuff to come out. Finished? Return to the trenches, with maybe something having sparked while doing that to try on the problems that you’ve not tried today.

So I guess that’s what I’ll do: try to lose myself in the world of my own creation for a little while at least. Some progress is better than none, and I need to make a lot of progress, so “some” is laying the path to “a lot”.

One of the issues is thinking the created art sucks, another that no one will like it. I’ve decided my new motto for that stupid little voice saying all that nonsense is: fuck it. Gonna do it anyway. I’ve read, either in part or in full, quite a lot of bad books. The difference is that they finished and put their art out there. That’s what I need to do and what I am going to do.

After that scumbag nazi crap up in VA, we could all use some happynicetime, I think.

Today I went out to the beeyard early to feed the bees and check up on a couple to see if they needed another box. It was mostly sunny, and they were waking up, stretching, and getting ready to go about their day, so they were only mildly ticked to have me stomping around and checking them out. There are a couple of them lagging behind their sister hives in growth, but the season is long here, and there is time for them to get to a comfortable size before “winter” comes.

Speaking of bees….honey! It’s a nice division of labor: the bees make the honey. I manage the bees to make sure they’re healthy, fed through the dearth, and are otherwise ok through the year. When it’s time, I pull honey off the bees and bring it out of the yard and into the garage for processing. My sister does most of the uncapping and extraction (when it’s a big pull, we both do some uncapping and get the frames into the extractor). We let the extractor do its work – I have to say here that the larger, motorized extractor is one of the better purchases I’ve made, and has already paid for itself in time – and get the extracted honey into buckets. From there, mom is the primary bottler of the honey. We had a bit of an issue with the gate on one bucket leaking, so had to transfer the batch into another bucket.

Lovely, dark honey

Next task, after letting the honey sit for awhile to let any bubbles (and pollen) come to the top: bottling.

Before you know it, you have a bunch of bottles to label and sell:

Pure, raw honey

We do not pasteurize our honey. It’s raw, strained only through a medium coarse strainer to catch things like wax and dead bees, while allowing any pollen through and into the jar. Best honey on earth! (Or at least our little part of it.)

That’s it for now, in another post that has taken two days to write. Until next time, peeps, be well.

This mating ritual of a couple of hooded grebes is hilarious for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the almost tango they’re doing at the end.

Here at the ranch, it was shave the dogs day, which took an hour and a half. The (not) puppy doesn’t like to sit still for his, and he absolutely hates having his front legs shaved. For some reason, he is not as nutty about his rear legs getting the once over. The big guy came over, laid on his side, then didn’t complain when I flipped his 64-pound body over to his other side so I could continue. He is a border collie (mostly), so under his hair that looks like human hair, he has a dense, tightly woven almost mat-like hair growth. I imagine this is what helps keep them dry and insulated against running into water or being out in the elements as they work. Except mine doesn’t exactly work at much of anything except running crows off and barking his big boy bark at people who are checking the mail.

I promised pics – here’s a snap of my hippie dogs, desperate for a hair cut.

If you’ve seen Dodegball: A True Underdog Story – you haven’t? Hie thee to on demand or Amazon or somewhere and watch it! ESPN is finally bringing The Ocho to life. For one day. But what a day that’s going to be! If you don’t understand The Ocho and/or why this is so hilarious, see above re: hie thee. It’s going to be spectacular. No doubt there are things people will be unfamiliar with – I didn’t even know what they meant by the Championship of Bags until I looked it up. That is known pretty well down here in the South as cornhole (yes, yes, I know). I did, however, know what Kabaddi was – and let me tell you what a weird freaking game that is. They also have a rather unfortunate pictogram:

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time right now to post them. But today – a day that was supposed to be all rain, all day, turned into another bum forecast for this area. The large mass of heavy storms burned themselves out before they got to us. We did get about 0.15 inches of rain today, which is just enough to be annoying: can’t mow, can’t work on pulling weeds (because getting all the soil off the roots is a pain), can’t work with the bees, and so on.

It was, though, an excellent day for having my niece and nephew over while my sister took care of a few things, and during a break in the rain we did have, we picked some muscadine grapes from the vine in the herb garden. I also found some caterpillars on the foliage. At first, in my addled, needs-much-more-sleep brain, I thought, hey, monarchs! Then I reminded myself they only use milkweed, which this was not, and their caterpillars have no hairs, as these did. We finally identified them with some help from Stacy (thanks!) as grapeleaf skelentonizer caterpillars – an entirely apt name, because that’s exactly what they do to the leaves on the grapevines. The adult moth they morph into is ugly, too. I counted 15, mostly young ones. Tomorrow, I’ll go on caterpillar patrol and kill them all.

The first round of peppers I harvested the other day is in and drying. By tomorrow morning, they will be fully dried, and I’ll start round two. Given the shape the plants and fruits are in, there will only be two rounds this time. Tomorrow, my sister is coming over, and we will pull the pepper plants that have been chewed away/damaged to nothing, along with the squash and zuke plants the bugs got to. We did manage to get some yellow squash off early from those, and they were delicious. Inattention, however, allows the bugs to take over and destroy things. If only some bright person would come up with a commercially viable solution for leaf-footed bugs and stinkbugs, they’d make a fortune.

Very early this morning, I went to the doc for my annual checkup, even though I had just seen him two weeks ago. All my bloodwork is normal, except for a couple of items that are slightly out of normal range, but not so far out that they’re problematic. Xrays are good, scans are good, and on paper, if someone just looked at these results, they’d pronounce me in fine health indeed. And that, of course, is what I tell people: outside this cancer business (fuck you, cancer!), I’m healthy as a horse – healthier, actually, than most people. I did talk to him about my right shoulder, which I’ve either torn the rotator cuff or the labrum in, most likely. I’m fairly sure I did this months ago, and it’s progressively gotten worse, but I have ha so many things going on this year, it’s taken a seat behind all that. Now, though, it’s time, and it will probably take an mri to figure out what the problem is. Interesting note: my referral to an ortho doc happens to be to the brother of the doc who handled my radiation oncology work back in 2005 for the first cancer round. He also surgically repaired my primary doc’s rotator cuff injury, so he’s definitely the guy I want.

Tomorrow, we are planning to do some honey extraction – about 10 frames, I believe, that I pulled off the bees in the west yard. I really need to do a full round of inspections on the girls, and tomorrow I also need to feed them, as I’m behind a day on that.

And now, it’s back to tame the helldesk, get that cleared, and eventually tonight, get some sleep that is better than last night’s, which was atrocious even for my baseline of sleep habits.

In our corner of the world, anyway. For some reason, Tuesdays bring out the crazy. My guess, or just idle supposition, is that people are back to work, they’ve done whatever their boss has assigned them (or gotten through the day, or have it in progress, or whatever) and Tuesdays, they’re back to leeching off their employers’ Internet connection once more. It’s a theory.

Yesterday was productive, though, at least for yours truly: more peppers harvested and washed, ready for the start of the drying process (which will start after this is done). Alas, due to my illness and neglect, the squash plants are history, and the paprikas, harvested previously, gave themselves over to the bugs. The bells are not much better. About a third of the cayennes are still looking pretty spry, and the tabascos…well, nothing seems to bother them very much except leaving the fruits on the plants too long after they have ripened to red, leaving me to think maybe a little tabasco-based pepper sauce is something to be spritzing on the leaf-footed bugs and stinkbugs that are having their parties out there.

In any case, having called the season for what it is – a fail – I’m not more disappointed than I already am at the total lack of output. It’s the way things go sometimes, and I can’t change it, so there is no sense beating myself up over it. It has, however, led to some more tweaks to be laid out next season, and as with every process, continues to evolve. The one nagging factor is me: can I refrain from catching some bug during the early part of the season that takes me out of the game for weeks or months at a time? That process is also evolving: I’ll have to start wearing a mask most places I go. I’ll have to carry antiseptic towels in the car for when I go anywhere, to wipe down my hands and anything I’ve touched (phone, car door, etc.) while out. It’s annoying, but better to be in the habit of doing that than not to keep things on the ball here.

In other news, my little brother is moving back to the homestead, and bringing his cat. While the big guy probably won’t care all that much – he was smart enough not to tangle with my cats (RIP, all) when I moved out here – the puppy is either not as smart or allows his curiosity to get the better of him. My mother votes for option one. I, of course, vote for option two. It’s going to be interesting for a bit. On the plus side, I’ll have someone around a lot of times to do heavy lifting, which is damn hard for me with a feeding tube strapped to my abdomen – what a pain in the ass that is sometimes. I recommend not getting one, if you can help it.